Assassination Nation is one of the worst movies of the year that doesn’t deserve your attention or your money.
When we talk about bad movies, it’s important to start by admitting that bad movies exist on a wide spectrum. See, not all bad movies are created alike, and the manner in which we choose to judge them changes based on the kind of bad they really are.
First, there are those bad movies that were just doomed to be bad. Whether by the fault of the writing, casting, directing, or all of the above, these movies leave you asking yourself, “Why did they even want to make this in the first place?”
Then there are those bad movies that are actually great, made into masterpieces by their own absurd and/or amateurish qualities that leave you more enamored than displeased. There are those bad movies that are frustrating because they’re such obvious misfires: movies that should be good, yet miss the mark in a big way. Most commonly, bad movies are tolerable, yet completely forgettable, doomed to fade into obscurity by their inability to leave a mark on the audience one way or another.
However, the worst kinds of bad movies are those bad-bad movies. These bad movies are so deeply unlikable, so profoundly dumb, inert, and all around confounding that merely watching them feels like a complete waste of time and energy. Assassination Nation is one of those movies.
In the opening minutes of the movie, Assassination Nation treats its audience to an onslaught of sexually and violently gratuitous images while overlaying words like “trigger warning” in huge font. The movie seeks to send the audience a simple message: if you’re easily offended, this isn’t the movie for you. So, if the opening minutes of a film are intended to tell an audience how to watch a movie, Assassination Nation is telling its audience to walk out. Trust me, you should listen.
What follows this needlessly belligerent opening sequence is nearly two hours of vapid, self-aggrandizing, and purposefully yet pointlessly controversial storytelling that has little more to say than, “It’s edgy, right?” and “Technology’s a bitch!”
Assassination Nation follows the events in a small, supposedly safe American town after a hacker exposes the secrets of numerous residents. What begins as a pointed attack against prominent public officials spirals downward as over half the town’s residents find their emails, texts, and more shared freely online.
In order to understand Assassination Nation, one has to buy into the movie’s central concept: that the reveal of such large amounts of private information would cause a community to turn against itself and break out into chaos and violence. More specifically, the movie centers on four high school girls who become targets, forcing them to fight back against the violent threats to their lives.
Assassination Nation makes it exceedingly clear – through trite dialogue and embarrassingly scripted voiceover – that it believes itself to be a clever commentary on feminism and misogyny in America today and an intelligent critique of social media and personal privacy. Yet no matter how highly the movie thinks of itself, it is neither of those things.
It’s a tone deaf depiction of technology that presupposes that all it takes for a community to want to kill one another is some hacked texts. Maybe this would be a believable commentary if the movie didn’t take itself so seriously or if it could muster up an articulate and effective satire, yet there were no deft hands behind Assassination Nation; the movie is chock-full of fake deep sentiments that feel ripped from the musings of a pathetic comic book villain.
Moreover, if Assassination Nation is intended to be some feminist rallying cry, it’s hardly encouraging how much of the movie is spent needlessly demeaning the women in the story. There’s nothing encouraging about the hyper-stylized violence, especially against women, that the movie so thoroughly relishes in. Even more frustrating is the fact that the movie barely manages to give the protagonists a comeback arc that justifies everything that came before.
The irony of Assassination Nation is that it seeks to carve out some statement against the toxic masculinity so rampant in our culture today, yet a movie like this could only be born out of the institutional hierarchies that have allowed that toxic masculinity to exist for so long.
I’ll give the movie credit for one thing: I’ve never seen a movie be so bad in such a specific way. Assassination Nation exists at this bizarre intersection of being obviously derivative (saying nothing that movies like Mean Girls and Heathers haven’t already said better themselves) and shockingly inept at presenting a coherent narrative.
The movie is so bogged down by its own lofty aspirations (its desperate attempt to connect with the masses and become a classic) that it fails to present anything even remotely interesting. It’s as shallow as a kiddie pool and seeks to disguise its lack of depth with stylistic flourishes and iconography of girls holding guns.
Assassination Nation knows it’s divisive and is determined to remind the audience of that over and over again. In this way, the movie seemingly wants its detractors to be offended; if the movie seeks to offend, then offended reactions would only serve to reinforce the success of the movie’s message.
But see, I wasn’t offended by Assassination Nation. I wasn’t offended because, in 2018, I’ve been forced to learn the difference between genuinely harmful affronts and intellectually barren bullshit that just clouds the air I’m breathing. Ultimately, Assassination Nation is nothing more than that: a temporary nuisance that will evaporate within a few weeks.
In her opening monologue, our protagonist Lily says, “This is a thousand percent a true story about how the quiet, all-American town of Salem absolutely lost its mind.”
Of course, there’s nothing true about Assassination Nation and this line is meant to cue the audience in to the kind of hyperbolic satire they’re about to endure. Unfortunately, the movie has its tongue so firmly lodged in its cheek that it’s unable to say anything worth listening to.
Rating: ⭐️ (out of 5)
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